A Demon for Midwinter

by K. L. Noone

  “Please.” Kris held out hands. “Share your demon secrets.”

  “I don’t know how it works!” Justin waved hands back at him, a theatrical sorcerer’s gesture. “Everything sort of resets. I can still get hurt, and if I don’t have a chance to switch aspects it’s just like being human, I’m totally mortal. It’s hell on tattoos and piercings, by the way. I found that out when I was nineteen. I had plans, absolutely spectacular art, we even got started, you should’ve seen it, I wanted a whole sleeve…”

  “What happened?”

  “I, um, tripped over somebody on a dancefloor, broke my ankle, hopped into the closest restroom—this was at, oh, the third club of the night, as far as I remember—and I switched in and out and fixed the ankle but lost everything else. I told you, it resets. Piercings stay if they’re iron and I don’t take them out, but the second I do…” One more handwave. “Poof. I never went back to my tattoo guy. Couldn’t explain.”

  “I know so many people who would be so envious right now.”

  “The problem is I end up losing the hair dye too and then I’m stuck like this.” Justin poked his hair. It leapt up in friendly fire-tendrils. “It’s a good thing I can teleport. Get myself out of club bathrooms and back home. Summon new dye kits from the store. I always leave money, I’m not going to steal anything.”

  “You are,” Kris told him, “utterly, profoundly amazing.” True. “So what else can you do? Besides teleport and heal and conjure up cosmetic products—don’t do anything if it’s going to hurt!”

  “Small stuff won’t.” Justin had lifted a hand in preparation, but paused, ears pink but willing to jump in. His expression said he couldn’t quite believe the interest but wanted to. Kris wanted him to, too. “I’m only half, remember, and moving big things kind of tires me out, but I can show you…”

  “Oh yes,” Kris said. “Yes yes yes. Go on. Show off. I’m giving you permission, it’s my apartment, go crazy, don’t do anything that’ll tire you out more or I’ll, I don’t know, what don’t you like? Never mind.”

  Justin dissolved into laughter. Kris was too excited and letting it show, but he couldn’t help it. He’d discovered that he could rescue someone, that he could be a refuge and not a burden, that he could make Justin smile.

  Plus, he’d never seen proper demonic magic. Curiosity rampaged.

  “Okay.” Justin held out a hand. “I can only summon things I’ve seen before, or if I can see it on the spot, or if I know exactly what it looks like, from pictures or something. Distance isn’t a problem unless I’m already tired. So…”

  A finger-snap. A hand that’d been empty now less so. Holding Kris’s scarf from the day before. Grey fabric fell over slim fingers like water.

  Kris applauded.

  “This one’s a little harder…” Justin sent the scarf back wherever it’d been—the bedroom floor, most likely—and got a little line of concentration between eyebrows.

  A gingerbread latte in a Witch’s Brew cup steamed gently in his hand, cheering them on.

  “Here.” Justin handed it over. “That one’s trickier because if they don’t have any already made I have to conjure it. Plus I leave money, so it’s an exchange. Push and pull. You can have this one.”

  “We can share—you can conjure coffee, what the hell, what are you doing working in the music business, you should be a bloody billionaire—”

  “Name something you want.” Justin’s eyes danced. “Anything. Um. Nothing I can’t picture. Sorry.”

  “Hang on, let me think…” Possibilities abounded. But he refused to hurt Justin, so nothing large, nothing requiring effort—but nothing so easy as to be an insult—“Did you ever see a copy of Sailfish’s Heavens to Betsy record? On vinyl? Would that work? I lent mine to a friend, decades ago, never got it back.”

  “I did, and I think I can even get yours.” Justin radiated conspiratorial excitement at him: a demon allowed to play, forgetting masks and public scrutiny. “You used a picture of it in the album cover for Shooting Starr, the one with the collage of all your band’s collections, remember? I have that album, which means I’ve seen your copy of Betsy, so as long as it still exists, just give me a minute to come up with the details…”

  Thirty seconds later, a battered first-edition record landed on the table. It flopped down comfortably, smoking slightly, and beamed at them. It even had the torn left corner and the beer-ring stain.

  “Oh sweet Mithras,” Kris said, to it and to Justin. “How are you—how can you do this?”

  “It’s—”

  Pizza arrived. The front buzzer went off, with the annoyed press of a delivery person who had other Midwinter stops to get to. Kris got up without thinking and opened the door and accepted pies, hot and cheesy and decadent; when he turned around Justin had become a lump of blanket.

  “Sorry,” said the blanket. “Hair. Demon. I wasn’t sure whether he could see me from the door.”

  “Fuck.” Sheer horror: not only at the narrow escape but at the fact that Justin had to think that way every day. “I’m sorry. I didn’t even—dammit.”

  “No, it’s fine.” Untidy hair and big holiday-spice eyes reemerged and came to help with pizza-boxes. “Are those artichokes? I love artichoke on pizza.”

  Kris felt an unreasonably large bubble of pride expand in his chest. “You can have all of it.”

  “Do you not like it? Did you order that one for me?” Justin paused to consider three large pizzas. “How many people are we feeding?”

  We. The bubble got bigger. Fonder. “I…like it too…but you need it more. I’m good with anything really. Except anchovies. That’s not on.”

  “Agreed.” Justin waved a pizza-slice at him. “And we’re sharing. You said. Oh wow this is perfect, thank you, I needed food.”

  Kris watched in amusement as the first slice disappeared, and then thought about why Justin needed food. Guilt hit like a vinyl-shaped dump-truck. “Tell me if you need anything else. More pizza. Coffee. Anything.”

  Justin paused halfway through the defenseless second slice. “Are you worried about me?” He had sauce on his fingertips and a coil of blanket at his back; he looked like someone barely old enough to drink, someone who should be tucked up at home with hot cocoa and fluffy marshmallows to toast. “I’m not even tired anymore. You asked for something easy. I just like pizza. Did you want me to answer the question, earlier?”

  “The—oh. Yeah, if you don’t mind talking about it. How does this—” He gestured vaguely, inarticulate. “—work?” The roughly ninety-eight percent of the human population who had magic normally developed one specific strength, generally through some kind of affinity: for weather-patterns, for emotion, for physical objects and items. Justin seemed able to do nearly anything, albeit with some limitations of energy.

  “I can tell you as much as I understand,” Justin said around an oversized bite. “I haven’t exactly studied, y’know, demonology. So this is based on sort of just being one. This is really good, you should have some, otherwise I’ll eat it all, please.”

  Kris gave in and picked up a slice. Couldn’t refuse. “Sounds like grounds for expertise to me.”

  Justin blushed for no readily discernable reason. “Um. Maybe? No. Anyway, you know demons sort of…feed on mortal…life energy. Souls, if you want to get metaphysical. Which is why all the bad press. But they can’t just pounce on you and start sucking, there has to be an exchange, an agreement, one of the rules for how transference works…”

  “Okay…”

  “So if you’re going to tempt someone, you have to be able to get them what they want. Very Mephistopheles.” Justin explored the pepperoni pizza, presumably having decided to leave the artichokes for Kris, who’d mentioned also liking them. “I personally, being half human, can’t reach across the infinite span of time and space or whatever. Limitations. I don’t eat souls, but I do get tired, I can only summon whatever I can visualize clearly, and I can only teleport to places I’ve been or have a clear picture o
f. I also look human. Most of the time.”

  “And you save babies.”

  “I’m not…” Justin put down the pepperoni slice, one bite gone. Said quietly to it, not looking at Kris, “Don’t think I’m a good person. I told you earlier that I lie to everyone. About myself. I don’t do anything to change the way people think about demons even though I know good ones exist. Like my mother. I hide in music and I’m scared a lot and I get drunk and sleep with tax lawyers I’ve just met at a club and I lie to him too, every day…don’t tell me I’m any kind of hero.”

  But you are, Kris wanted to argue. You with your burning hair, sitting on my sofa, eating your second-choice flavor of pizza. You’re twenty-eight and you’ve lost a parent and learned how to cope with demon horns and vanishing tattoos and you try to do the best you can for your bands and artists every morning, when you wake up. You rescue tiny infants when you know you’re putting your power on display.

  You’re the kind of person who would be a hero, he thought. Human. Frayed edges. Afraid. Young and braver than I ever could be. A prince in a story, not a tidy sanitized tale but a full tangled tapestry of hurt and grief and love and compassion. Yes, a hero.

  He wanted to write another song. A banner. A waving flag.

  He said, “This’s why I can’t push you, right? Empathy?”

  “What?” Justin didn’t look up. “Yeah. Most demons’re immune; I’m resistant, you could probably get it through if you tried long enough and hard enough, but it’d take a massive amount of effort.”

  “But you can feel it. If I’m projecting.” Justin had said as much, outside the recording studio. “You know what I’m trying to get you to feel, what I’m feeling, it’s just that it doesn’t register as a suggestion?”

  “Yes…” Justin nudged the pizza, making it slide across the box in a forlorn heap of cheese and meat and crust. “Does it matter? I mean, I guess it does, you deserve to know, I suppose I technically lied about that too.”

  “You only never said anything.” He held out a hand. “Can I try something?”

  Justin lifted his head. His eyes got confused when they landed on the outstretched offering. “Touching me won’t make a difference.”

  “Not that kind of difference. Come on, I don’t bite, not even on stage.” He aimed for a smile; one edge of Justin’s mouth tilted up. “Trust me.”

  “Why not,” Justin sighed, not exactly a resounding vote of confidence, but he did take Kris’s hand. His fingers were long and slim and graceful, curling around Kris’s own; Kris’s heart skipped a beat or two, fluttering in his throat, answering the call of sensation.

  “Right,” he said, and took a deep breath, and pushed: not everything he was feeling, not the hidden secret glee at holding that hand, not the surety that this was love and he’d never understood it before, but everything else. His astonishment and delight at the magic. His admiration, pouring out like a stream, silver and true. His bedrock certainty that Justin was a good person, layered with every time Justin’d found his phone or believed in his career, stone after stone like pebbles shining in the sun, stories etched in geology and light. Awareness that no, Justin wasn’t perfect, nobody was perfect, but perfect was boring anyway, who had room for perfect in rock and roll…

  He held it all out. Projection had always been his particular skill: empathy in the music, in concert venues or studio recordings, making listeners dance or weep. He couldn’t convince Justin to do anything, but he could offer this truth if it might be heard.

  “Oh,” Justin said, astonished. Those eyes were huge, gazing back at him. Carnation and cinnamon, rose-stripes and wonder, lush and bottomless. “Kris, I—I don’t know what to—that’s not—the way you see me, I’m not—that sounds so ungrateful, this is so—I don’t know what to say. You mean it.”

  “Every bit.”

  “Then…thank you.” Justin kept gazing at him, lips parted, breathless. “I’ve never felt…my family tells me they love me, they think I’m great, all that, but with you…it’s different, feeling it…”

  “So it helps?” And he couldn’t help the question. Couldn’t keep wistfulness out.

  Justin’s cheeks went pink: sudden adorable honest shyness. “It does. But it’s—so much—you have no idea how much this feels like a fantasy I had—oh fuck not that kind of fantasy!”

  Kris raised eyebrows. Deliberately.

  “Um. You know.” Properly blushing now, with a desperate attempt at a never mind! shrug. That hand hadn’t left his. Kris’s fingers wanted to dance with glee. “I only meant—so you can’t laugh, okay, if I tell you this—I used to think, um, you would be a nice person to talk to? Being an empath? Being so open about, um, sex and magic and—I know, I know, it’s the stupid lonely teenage kid daydream, when your idol comes down off the poster and really just sort of gets you—can we please forget I said anything. Ever. Any words. All my words.”

  So many answers. So many unfolding worlds. So many fantasies.

  His living room quivered with futures: myriad, vibrant, bewitching. Guitar-strings and a demon holding his hand. Artichokes on pizza and laughter and rock-and-roll trivia. His heart twirled; his body felt fifteen again too, clumsy inarticulate coruscations of want racing along veins.

  Not that kind of fantasy, though. At least not that Justin was willing to admit to. And why would he? He had a boyfriend. He had a square-jawed successful lawyer of a boyfriend, who wanted him to move in.

  Futures came crashing down. Knocked Kris and Kris’s heart back into the reality in which he was a past-his-prime once-star, and Justin was a twenty-eight-year-old classic-rock fan who might be his friend but also worked for the advancement of his career.

  He summoned every ounce of stage presence. “All your words? Even the bit about liking pizza? Don’t make the pizza sad, love.”

  Justin’s expression was indecipherable: not emotionless, but a study in confusion, as if thinking something else, as if figuring out a brand-new or very old concept, as if trying to say or not say more. He started a word, stopped. Started over. “Okay…we can keep the pizza part…we can’t have sad pizza…um. Thanks. For listening. To what I—thanks.”

  “Speaking of.” Kris released slim demon fingers. Kept the cost from showing. No visible cracks. Only in the moment: a fracturing, a slipping away, a loss. “Want to hear something?”

  Steve’d sent over a digital copy of the morning’s holiday-song recordings; he found his laptop and played them back for Justin, and valiantly did not cringe at his own voice. Echoes bouncing off walls. Hollow.

  Justin, sitting up and nibbling pizza, listened with the critical ear of a talent manager and music reviewer. His hair fluttered in nonexistent breezes: coal-black and flame-plumes, waving. He got garlic butter on a fingertip, licked it off. He did not exactly look at Kris, though he did not exactly look away. “That’s better. You sound more like you want to be there. In the song.”

  “I do listen to you, too.”

  “It’s interesting, though…complicated…put on ‘Little Black Dress’ again. This new version, I mean, the holiday edit.”

  Kris did, somewhat bemused. He knew Justin was capable and clever and good at his job, of course; he hadn’t been mentally prepared for the switch-flip from vulnerable trembling demon to professional critic.

  He thought, without conscious connection between the two ideas: he uses music as a shield. Passion as deflection.

  “It’s a song about sex,” Justin said. “The original. Black dress, black boots, red lips, all that…the night you spend with her, and then you never see her again, but you never forget her, or that little black dress…when you did it live at the final reunion show you sold it on, um, the no regrets, wild night, mutual lust, sort of feeling. This one feels different. Different emphasis, different emotion. What were you thinking about?”

  “Ah…” You. Wanting you to be happy. Knowing you’re too young and kind and good at heart for me. “I don’t remember. Steve’s donuts, probably.”

 
; “No.” Justin hummed a bar or two, paused, head on one side. “I wish you had decent live backing, not prerecorded, for the sympathetic connection…anyway, no. This one’s still about sex, it can’t not be with those lyrics—whether or not you changed it to ‘met her at a Midwinter party’—but it’s more about you letting her go. Or her leaving. It’s about one night when you know you won’t ever have more, and that’s her choice, and you’re singing it for her. That little black dress, black boots, red lips, and she’s walking out the door, and you wish she wouldn’t go but you won’t ask her to stay if she doesn’t want to, if she doesn’t want you…”

  “Are you sure you’re not thinking about the donuts,” Kris tried.

  “Kris.” Justin gave him a look eerily reminiscent of his least-favorite grammar-school teacher, if Miss Waterstone’d had flame-nymph hair and bonfire eyes and a talent for mapping out Kris’s soul. “It’s actually great. More complex. I love the bittersweet note there. It works well for Midwinter, too, in a weird way. About gifts and other people. When did you do this? You didn’t tell me.”

  “When did I…ah, this morning. Steve had some free time. And I felt I owed you a decent apology.” He stopped the recording. “Needs some polishing, but we can have an album done in time for last-minute holiday sales if we rush.”

  “You thought you owed me—” Justin shook his head. Light scattered across the sofa, pizza-boxes, the living-room wall. “So that’s what that is. Kris, I—”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Kris said hastily. “Did you think the bass came through well enough, or does it sound muddy to you?”

  This turned into a minor discussion, with respect to the quality of the digital recording and laptop speakers. Kris ended up sending the whole package over, minus one very particular audio file from the end of the session, for Justin to dissect later, and then defended himself against gently teasing charges of plagiarism regarding the guitar-riff from “Fire in the Night” and Roger Leigh’s obscure early-sixties protest song “Black Heat,” which he had in fact entirely ripped off as a seventeen-year-old ambitious punk with nothing to lose, and refused to admit. “You’re too young to know about Roger Leigh!”